Last Friday, Poland opened its first museum dedicated to LGBTQ history, a milestone in a country where legal recognition of gay rights remains limited. Located in Warsaw’s Marszalkowska Street, the museum was founded by Lambda, a Polish non-profit organisation that in recent years has also worked extensively with queer refugees arriving in the country.
“We are opening the world’s first queer museum in a country where the legal situation for queer people is the worst in the entire EU,” said Miłosz Przepiórkowski, president of Lambda, in a statement at the museum’s opening last week.
The museum’s collection comprises about 150 objects, including letters, photographs and early activist materials, which tell the story of LGBTQ history in Poland since the 16th century. In a statement, Lambda director Krzysztof Kliszczynski described the museum as the first of its kind in post-communist Europe.
The ceremony attracted key figures from Polish LGBTQ activist circles, including writer Andrzej Selerowicz and Ryszard Kisiel, who both worked as activists in Warsaw in the 1980s. At the time when the two were most active, the Polish police had launched a widespread campaign to profile gay men in the city and create a registry with their information. The two men donated personal materials to the museum’s collection. Kisiel contributed a decades-old pamphlet on safe sex, while Selerowicz donated a photograph showing him with his partner some 45 years ago.
Kliszczynsk pointed out that preserving these stories has been a challenge, as many of Poland’s LGBTQ documents have remained private or have been destroyed. A difficulty that is even more dramatically reflected in the political and social context of the country, which still does not recognise same-sex unions and is even embarking on discriminatory anti-LGBTQ policies. A museum, in this sense, assumes a symbolic value, but also an active one in the ideological struggle.
